Delivering Inclusion With Rain Barrels (CityStudio #9)

For the second time during the last month, I have heard the same key piece of information regarding the hearts and minds of Vancouverites. Of all the categories, including such prevailing topics as affordability in housing and daily life, people who live here rate inclusion, or a having a sense of belonging, as their primary indicator of happiness. According to Vancouver Foundation's 2010 Vital Signs report, "regardless of our religion, race, colour, age or gender, we [Vancouverites] all want to feel that we belong, and can make a contribution to our society. By developing connections with each other, we build trust, and this is what keeps our community strong and vital."

City Councillor Andrea Reimer, during her second visit to CityStudio, first brought attention to this document and its statistic. Just this week, Jennifer Bailey, the city's Water Quality & Conservation Program Manager, echoed this information. She recently attended a workshop on community-based social marketing where many presented case studies suggested how people embody a very strong need to belong. A large body of research has illustrated how social approval of our behaviour is generally quite important to people. In contemporary North American society, this need has grown more acute as people increase their use of computers and cars and further physically isolate themselves from their communities.

The ironic beauty of the first of The Long Table Series events, our contribution to CityStudio, is how we plan to turn another aspect of social isolation in Vancouver–the ever present rain–into something that can help to inspire the opposite. The event will include opportunities for the community to gather to meet, learn, and collaborate around practical projects for engaging directly with water quality and conservation. At the heart of this will be the rain barrel, an object that transcends scale with regards to its ability to impact water quality.

At the residential scale, rain barrels physically connect their users to the source, inspiring awareness about consumption. They defer use of a potable supply of water and grow gardens with stored rain. At the city and regional scale, they have the collective power to defer rainfall from the storm sewer system, stop combined sewage overflow events, and keep False Creek clean and healthy for the likes of spawning herring, feeding whales, and sporting humans.

Each aspect of the event will be framed in a way that demonstrates social approval of the desired behaviour. Rather than motivate people to act by offering a prize (such as a free rain barrel), which is temporary and is shown to not compel them to consider acting differently, we will connect people to each other in the name of health and healthy, bountiful local waterways. Suitably, the first of the series will be known as, Water Table: Collaborating to grow community with harvested rainwater. It will bring the high level concepts of what the city wants to become the greenest to our own backyards so that we all can become part of the solution.